Nominees

Peacetime, Eddi Reader's sixth solo album, follows one of the most successful records of her near-quarter century career. Though she has always dipped into traditional song - The Blacksmith from her beautiful debut solo record Mirmama; I Loved A Lad; Ay Fond Kiss and Jock O'Hazeldean with Fairground Attraction, the band that made her a star - this was something different: an album of songs by Robert Burns that came about almost by accident, became a word-of-mouth hit and soundtracked her long-come return home to Scotland.

To someone brought up on Elvis Presley and the Beatles, Eddi explains, that "stuff that was as exotic as it would be to someone from Norwich! More though luck than planning, she found herself focusing on Burns' work. "I was asked to sing with the Scottish National Orchestra who were doing a Burns festival. So I maybe had four Burns songs, then I thought well if I had eight I could do a gig, then there were ten, then there was Celtic Connections... The songs just landed in my lap really, and I got the idea that I could do a record."

Not only was the record rapturously received, it kept selling. She had met "a whole bunch" of Scottish musicians doing the Burns album - people she'd known over the years but never played with. So Peacetime was born out of the desire to pull all the disparate elements of her musical life together - the traditional musicians, her longstanding collaborators, her partner and sometime Trash Can Sinatra John Douglas.

Two Ayrshire rivers run strong through Peacetime. The Afton gives its name to a song by Johnny Dillon from the band Heirloom; John McCusker brought Eddi Baron's Heir. Old songs, but the themes, of course, are current as they ever were. Which is why it's not such a leap to a song like the heartbreakingly lovely Safe As Houses, written by Eddi and Boo after the London bombings - a terrible situation in which simple human imperatives assert themselves.